Sullivan ably captures the culture of the 1960s with the advent of TV, rock ’n’ roll and the limitations of addiction...
An imposing 30-room mansion provides the backdrop for a “boys will be boys and drunks will be drunks” romp through the 1950s and ’60s.
Through the eyes of a young boy steeped in comic books, we see how former adman Sullivan (Advertising/Savannah Coll. of Art and Design; Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This: A Guide to Creating Great Ads, 1998) and his five brothers survived their abusive, alcoholic father, a surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. The author peppers the text with the comic-book characters who helped him live within the chaos. He recounts the family legends of BB guns, cherry bombs strapped to arrows, poison ivy–infused squirt guns and a bowl of urine tossed in one brother’s face. Sullivan mined decades of letters between his mother and her father, together with his brothers’ diaries and journals to provide the narrative and emotional content for his father’s slide into rage and addiction. Few lifelines existed for his family. When his father tried to smash a locked door that he, his brother and mother were hiding behind, Sullivan climbed out the second-story window and ran next door for help. However, the neighbor was drunk and couldn’t comprehend the danger: “The world reels a little bit and the lesson tattoos itself inside: there are no sane adults in power anywhere.” His mother finally moved them out of the house, but she was allowed only a quarter of her husband’s salary to support the seven of them. The author mostly explores the brothers’ story, but we also understand the trauma his mother endured.
Sullivan ably captures the culture of the 1960s with the advent of TV, rock ’n’ roll and the limitations of addiction treatment.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8166-7955-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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